Recap

This is a recap starting from the 14th of July, which happens to be the French Independence day. I apologize for not posting at all during this rather long period of time, we've been rather distracted what with things being more French than we expected. Plus, finding internet when you have none is fairly difficult. All right. Here goes.

The 13th was our first day at French school, a place called "Fondation La Navarre", which, or so I've heard, is a place where all of the trouble children go during the school year. Which makes sense, considering there's a huge gate up front, all of the glass has cracks in it, and every single window has bars to prevent the children from escaping. A veritable prison. I'm in the highest level class with about seven other people, and it's hilarious because all of the teachers just love making announcements to our section because they don't have to speak slowly and use hand gestures. Just another ego boost to make me all the more hated once I get back. Or maybe before. After we went to school, we began preparing to meet the Mazzeis, a family that my mother has been following considering that we share some ancestry with them: If we can prove that we share ancestry with an Italian family, and that that family emigrated to the United States and had a child before they renounced their Italian citizenship, then we ourselves can become Italian citizens and therefore European Union citizens, which means that we can actually work in Europe. It's a rather long story.
Anyways, after we left, our GPS ended up taking us to the wrong place (oops!) and we ended up being 20 minutes late getting there. Great first impression, but I've heard that the Italians can be up to 1 hour late and not notice at all, which makes me feel somewhat better. We met them in Bandol, which is really a wonderful little town right on a huge harbor. After meeting them out in front of the town casino, we went to a little cafe and talked a bit. After that, we went to Lenou (the mother)'s brother's shoe shop, which was, funnily enough, called "Scalise", which is another Italian family name of ours. After that, we headed back to our minivan, which they found absolutely enormous, and went up to their house, where they literally stuffed us to the gills with a 3-course lunch: Paté, ham, sausage, and bread followed by a pasta dish and some salad (with olive oil as dressing) followed by pastries, followed by fruit. My mother explained to us that the more food they offered us, the more they liked us, and that we should try not to offend them, but I literally have never eaten so much in my life. And that was only lunch. After walking down to the harbor, they bought us ice cream, and after returning to the house they decided to serve us dinner, only it was the very same food that we had said we weren't able to eat 3 hours ago. So we stuffed ourselves again. With the same food. Later on, my mom admitted that at the time the only thing she was thinking about was how much she'd have to work out to lose all of the weight that she had likely gained from that day.
So, after nearly exploding, we went back down to the harbor to watch the fireworks (it was Bastille Day, and I was anticipating making up for what I had missed the 4th, considering the fact that all we really did was sat and stared at each other while a huge party was going on back home. And I was somewhat disappointed, but only because I was expecting American-size fireworks from a tiny beach town. They had anchored a battleship in the middle of the bay, and I was amazed at how many bottle rockets they could fit on the thing (although it is a battleship, I suppose). The show lasted about 20 minutes, and then everyone and their mother began running to the car to beat the end-of-fireworks rush. So we all returned to the house for a glass of water, and then we managed to find a clever way of avoiding the traffic that knocked at least 45 minutes off of our journey back, which was already a good half-hour. Plus, it was about 12:30 AM, meaning that we were going to be zombies when we went to French school the next day.
The next day was fairly uneventful: we pretty much went to school, got back, took a little nap, and then the Mazzeis arrived. We talked, ate (less) food, and skyped with my father, who was in Germany at the time. The funny thing was, my dad hasn't seen us in at least 1-2 weeks, and after speaking Spanish and German to everyone for that amount of time, he was absolutely craving an English conversation. Only thing was, the Mazzeis were over. So he was greeted with "Ciao Henry! On va parler en Français maintenant, ou si vous voulez on peut discuter en Italien!" For those of you non-French speakers, that was basically the Mazzeis telling my dad to speak in French to them, or Italian if he wanted. It was all he could do to not explode. Lucky for him, though, that he was arriving in Marseilles the following evening and would stay at our apartment for the next two days. The only two problems were that Marseilles was about 90 minutes away from our apartment and about 50 minutes away from the Mazzeis, and that their prioritization was more oriented to finishing the meal that they had made for us. So he ended up waiting for about 15 minutes, just about ready to start looking for hotels (the shuttles stopped running at midnight). Once we picked him up, the back of the car immediately went to sleep while my dad told me and my mom about his adventures in Spain, Holland, and Germany.
Today we went into town and watched Toy Story 3, and even though it was in French I found it absolutely wonderful; I really love sequels that don't make me cry. After that, we went and saw the old town, which forced me to imagine my mother trying to navigate the 2-meter wide streets in her minivan (we came very very near to that particular situation, she had to pull back her mirrors just so she could fit in the street). Once we got up to the top, though, it really was amazing: you could literally see the entire village (old and new) sprawled out in front of you, with the structures terminating where the sea began. I love views, but unfortunately my camera's been acting up lately, so I'm afraid I can't share it with you. I hope my readers (if I have any) are actually appreciating the fact that I added pictures to this post, though.